Posted
by
BeauHDon Monday January 15, 2018 @05:43PM
from the cheaper-by-the-dozen dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Municipal broadband networks generally offer cheaper entry-level prices than private Internet providers, and the city-run networks also make it easier for customers to find out the real price of service, a new study from Harvard University researchers found. Researchers collected advertised prices for entry-level broadband plans -- those meeting the federal standard of at least 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds -- offered by 40 community-owned ISPs and compared them to advertised prices from private competitors. The report by researchers at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard doesn't provide a complete picture of municipal vs. private pricing. But that's largely because data about private ISPs' prices is often more difficult to get than information about municipal network pricing, the report says. In cases where the researchers were able to compare municipal prices to private ISP prices, the city-run networks almost always offered lower prices. This may help explain why the broadband industry has repeatedly fought against the expansion of municipal broadband networks.

What the publicly owned ISP's don't offer is campaign contributions, which is why there are state laws against them, which is as it should be.
The American people should just continue to pay for the private infrastructure of the monopoly providers and give up on this pointless dream of cheap, fast internet access.

Building a fiber network is expensive - much more expensive than running it for couple years. The first two municipal fiber projects I looked up cost the taxpayers an average of $3,200 per household to build. Whether you want it or not, every resident had to pay to build it and that's the bulk of the cost.

The monthly subscription fees which cover the cost of maintaining it after it's built are a small portion of the cost. Rather than listing a muni such as Lake County as $40/month, if the "study" were int

It occurs to me my post was a tad negative, a reaction to yet another misleading propaganda piece on Slashdot. I'm not saying that muni can never work, some might work out okay - just be honest about the numbers. Honest numbers might be something like "on average, muni customers pay $10 less and are responsible for $3,000/household in debt used to build the network". If we'd use honest numbers we could have a rational discussion rather than a propaganda war.

Building a fiber network is expensive - much more expensive than running it for couple years. The first two municipal fiber projects I looked up cost the taxpayers an average of $3,200 per household to build. Whether you want it or not, every resident had to pay to build it and that's the bulk of the cost.

How is that different than the billions upon billions of dollars that we already paid in taxes so that private ISPs could build that infrastructure?

Can you perhaps come up with even one example of any city in the US where privately-owned fiber was installed with tax dollars? Anywhere? You can easily look at the annual reports of all the ISPs and telcos and see the billions of dollars they spent, do you see a single dollar of tax money anywhere?

They only projects I know of that involved tax money were failed municipal projects, where after the city got tired of losing money on a project that wasn't working and it went dark they later sold the dark fibe

I skimmed through the 350 pages of that book and didn't find a single mention of any tax money whatsoever spent for any private company to build their fiber in any city in US.

I did find a pissed off author who is very creative in his arithmetic. His basic argument is as follows:

Telcos should spend 25% of their revenue on wireline upgrades. (No real justification for that number, just from his ass.)If you ignore Uverse, FiOS, and other major upgrades, the remaining minor upgrades are less than 25% of revenu

Now, to be fair, government run services tend to be pricey and poorly done. Cost overruns and project delays are the norm.

To realize that the government is able to provide these services better than a private company is shameful. Not entirely unexpected given the horrific state of telecom companies but still shameful. If there was ever an industry that needs revitalization, they are high on my list. This is doubly true since they're critical to almost every industry in virtually all modern and semi-mode

But you are going to have the same customer service as you do for your water bill...

In mine, that would be a private company, unrelated to the municipal government. So I ask you, so what?

Am I supposed to be upset?

I don't know about YOUR city, but the surly customer service representatives collecting checks for water, trash and sewer in my town are a sight to behold. Customer and Service are NOT part of their lexicon, certainly never used in the same sentence about them except to complain about the lack there of. And these folks get to enjoy banker's hours, all national, state and local holidays, can never be fired for anything less than an on the job felony and will retire with a pension that makes even me blush.

Ah, apparently I am. Yet your recounting lacks authenticity.

Seems more like a personal problem, maybe you're just upset that they HAVE a pension, and aren't wage-peons slaving away under minimum wage. I don't know, you do seem to possess a certain antagonism that is clouding your judgment.

For this, you get to wait 2 weeks to have somebody out to turn on your water and bring you a trash and recyclables container even though you just gave them 3 months deposit...

It all happened next day for me. And every complaint I've have, they've fixed same day.

Generally, the city pays for the infrastructure but outsources the operation. Yea, so it'll be as awful as the outsourced garbage, the outsourced water, the outsourced electricity, and the gawdawful city provided monopoly to the cable company.

Seriously, you'd get better customer service with a backalley unlicensed visectomy than by calling up a cable company. If that's the service level you're comparing the city too, that's a pretty low bar.

But you are going to have the same customer service as you do for your water bill...

Can I get that in writing? Because my water service has never been interrupted, even briefly. My bill has never changed without notice, and never changed to charge me extra for things I was previously getting as part of my existing payment. The Water utility has never tried to to upsell me, and I don't have to pay for things I'll never use in order to get the water that I need. They don't charge existing customers more than newly signed up customers. I don't have to worry about them throttling my water

To be fair I don't think many private ISPs do any R&D either. They just implement the improvements developed elsewhere.

Also, from what I can determine none of the cities/towns with publicly run ISPs forbid other ISPs from coming into the area. They just have to compete with the public offering (although I would be happy to concede if this is a false assumption).

In my town, firemen go to almost every ambulance run. I have a radio scanner, and these guys are sent on runs all day and all night. My guess is:30% fucking off50% EMS runs15% false alarm fire runs5% actual fires

So, if you assume that actual fires are the only thing they do, then yeah, they spend 95% of the time doing something else.

However, I know many of them are doing other things during "fucking off" time, from visiting schools for safety training to inspections of businesses to keeping their gear in sh

Queue the fireman supporters who refuse to admit what they fully know to be true...most of the time is spent fucking off but they have an image to maintain.

Nothing is meant to take away from the services they DO provide. It takes guts to enter a burning building to save a life, etc. But that's the exception, not the norm, for how they spend their time. Sure, there are public services classes and training that they do but that stuff is still a minority of the time and has a heavy dog and pony aspect.

I was by no means saying they shouldn't be fucking off the majority of the time. Hell I hope they get to fuckoff 95% of the time, Their job is to work during time of disaster and emergency. And I'm sure we all feel the same way when it comes to that, I would gladly give my tax dollars for them to fuckoff and be ready when needed than to keep the money and face what happens when we dont have the.

why should a city civil engineer work 60 hours a week w/o over time (except during times of natural disasters). The problem is that most of the people on this board have developed a slave attitude about working over time.

The availability of government-provided internet does not preclude the availability of private internet. It adds options; it doesn't take them away.

Those who wish can continue to pay for Verizon/Comcast/whatever. And others can use the city internet. What's important is that now Verizon/Comcast will have to actually earn their subscribers, which means they will have to put a modicum of effort into out-performing the city-provided option.

I like your outlook on things, Here is to hoping they aren't forced by the feds to log every bit of traffic! Would be kind of unfair providing the private companies would have taxes and shit to pay and also not have control over the land to run the wires needed for faster internet, but on the other hand they should have thought about that before they started fucking over customers. Still a better plan than "Net Neutrality" in my opinion, then again that's my asshole, everyone's smells differently.

The fact that the private sector doesn't like competition is worrying. They can easily be pressured into blocking pr0n sites, access to various religious sites based on who is the terrorist of the day. Plus, history shows that the private sector cannot run things efficiently.

I'm just glad we have people in office who are defending our services and letting the public servants do the job and do it right.

As for service? Good luck. It is another added fee, and the cost of it can easily double, triple, go up an order of magnitude... and you either pay or else.

Comcast isn't perfect, it is an inefficiently run organization which can provide sloppy service to individuals.

Don't forget the creeping specter of fascism. If this keeps up, maybe we can use the gcorporate run Internet to share recipes for our pets and zoo animals.

will be buried in a landslide of counter studies by various pro-industry think tanks. A while back Comcast admitted in their SEC filing what it actually cost to provide internet access. It was about $9 bucks. That includes the tech support. Of course, don't you dare suggest we nationalize it. Here in America we privatize the profits and nationalize the losses, so it all balances out.

Oh, and if you're scared of the gov't censoring you when it's nationalized just cast your eyes to China. They don't _need_ to take control of it to censor. The mega-corps are happy to play ball.

I'm so confused why people are concerned about government censorship if it's nationalized. Comcast, AT&T, etc are legally required to censor if it's in the shareholder's benefit. The government is legally prohibited from censoring.

I mean, we could just regulate net neutrality, but that seems like a stopgap that's better handled by nationalizing wires. There's a place for competition, but it doesn't seem like stringing wires is where we want to rely on the free market.

Government granted monopolies is about the biggest possible way to interfere with a free market outside of making the sale and purchase of something illegal.

Also, if a city wants to set up their own local service to compete I don't see any problems with it as long as they don't bar anyone else from business or give themselves the same kind of monopolistic advantages that were being sold to individual cable companies. Also, these measures typically come about as a result of ballot measures by that city ra

I agree it's more the monopolies that bring things down. Government run departments and organisations are as prone as big monolithic corporations to seizing up and resisting change. Everything's great when they're new and fresh, the hard part is keeping the mindset and attitudes that way in the long term.

I'm in Australia, and I remember very well how bad broadband was under Telecom and Telstra. Even our dial-up internet was pretty poor, which is all we really had back then - the rest of the world was already rolling out cable and DSL. Telstra, as a largely government-owned "privatised" telco had no incentive to innovate, increase service levels or offer new products, were first forced to wholesale their retail access products to competitors and as the competition matured, forced to offer access to their physical plant (eg, copper pairs, exchange space, tower space) on a reasonable costing model. We had a huge, vibrant ecosystem of access providers offering fibre, wireless, DSL, etc up until ~2008, when everyone stopped investing and started waiting for the NBN to appear.

Now we have this NBN, which was designed completely contrary to the way it was marketed from the beginning (protecting the largest incumbent telcos' and NBN lead contractors' primary revenue streams) and has been built as a monolithic system with no competitive access to physical plant. Services that the NBN can't deliver aren't possible, successive governments have made the design worse (eg, the "MTM [nbnco.com.au]") and legislation prevents access providers from building competing retail networks over holes in coverage. To make it worse, the build-out contractors seem to be paid based on premises on-network rather than successfully connected, so up until late 2017 they've just been smashing out abysmal builds as quickly as possible and going back months later to fix the problems - the repair teams are a fraction of the size of the build teams, and repairing already requires more effort than doing it properly the first time.

This long rant (believe me, I've got a lot more and could go for a while) is just an example of a government network infrastructure project gone poorly. Contractors and design partners were chosen from existing large network operators and had a vested interest in not killing their biggest cash cows. Technology was chosen that would least impact their services and allow them to manoeuvre for competitive advantage down the track. Later governments took the remaining good parts of the design and returned it to the old Telstra model of using whatever can be scraped up, but this time we don't have competitors able to deploy their own equipment to underserviced areas or to supply missing features.

These successful municipal American ISPs have the right mindset (they've been created to fix problems and service customers) and are hopefully small enough to keep it. It doesn't really matter that they're associated with government.

"Private enterprise is more efficient!" go the cries of the free-market absolutists. The question is, more efficient at what, though. Because here it seems telecoms are optimized to extract maximum dollars from the population, which is not something the citizenry wants out of basic infrastructure.

Governments have very little power to get funding, if the citizens bother to vote. They have to get permissions to do almost everything, especially in a city that generally has to live by county, state, and federal rules.

A true free market fan should logically be angry if private industry gets special favors from government; like cable, oil, coal, farming, steel, oh, never mind, I guess everyone sucks at the goverment's teat.

Free market absolutists would be quick to point out that when the government grants companies legal monopolies and competition is barred from competing, you don't have much of a free market. Government would have far fewer problems to solve if it weren't creating so many of them to begin with. When you don't have to worry about outside competition taking your business, is it any wonder that a company can devote maximum effort to rent seeking behavior like this?

Of course, free market absolutists would do well to remember the phenomenon of the Natural Monopoly [wikipedia.org]. There are situations where competitive forces simply do not, and cannot, apply. In these situations, the only way to avoid rent-seeking and other exploitative behavior is government intervention.

by pointing out that government is far too useful for the ruling class to just pretend it doesn't exist, and so you're going to have government involvement whether you like it or not. So the only question is are you going to take control of the government or are you going to leave a power vacuum in place for the wealthy to exploit to your detriment?

You seem to think this is a price comparison between public services and private enterprise. It's not.

It's a price comparison between public service and a private company with a government-granted monopoly. If the government deliberately hands a private company a monopoly, of course its price is going to be higher than if the government provided the service itself.

The whole point of private enterprise is for competition to drive prices down and encourage the rapid development of technological advanc

Private enterprise is more-efficient when properly regulated, when transparent, and when there is a profit motive for being more-efficient.

Public utility is more-efficient when demand is roughly absolute, complexity is relatively-low, and information is readily-available.

Let's talk healthcare.

Around here, Medicare averages $49 for an office visit. Carefirst pays $32 (with blood draw), and as low as $29. Medicare can pay $65 at a practice where Carefirst pays $32, while Aetna pays $185. The price on t

I don't want to hear about any of this NN or Socialized ISP crap until we grant right of way to cables and conduits for third parties.

Its a giant shit show with monopolists of different types arguing for their monopoly.

Every article is "wahhh, monopolies that no one is allowed to compete with are behaving badly" or "waaah, government built ISPs which are even more monopolistic are even better!"...

How about no monopoly?

To which one of you knuckleheads will say "but then there will be too many cables and that will be ugly!"... This discussion is increasingly an argument against democracy if only because people are allowing themselves to be manipulated into taking positions because they're being told to adopt that position.

As to conditions, reasonable conditions. Same standard we use for all English Common Law. It isn't hard. Current conditions are not reasonable. Which is why only multi billion dollar corps can enter markets in most cases under these conditions.

As to who is in control, have the poles and conduits run by the city or state offering right of way access to whomever can meet reasonable regulations to gain that access.

As to me thinking, I don't think most people are thinking. That is the meaning of my statement. T

As to what you find uninformative, let us say I suggested right of way for people to drive cars on the road. And then the question was what sort of conditions would people have to meet to drive on the road.

And my response is "reasonable conditions"... Such as in the case of driving... passing a basic competency test in driving, understanding driving regulations, being recorded in state records, paying some nominal fees... etc. You want me to spell out a whole legal code? No. I'm going to assume you're reaso

No, they just weren't buried at that time. They have more wires than that now but they're in conduits.

The picture you're referencing is from New York city before a blizzard that knocked down all the cables. Also, I believe the majority of those cables are electrical wiries... and given that the picture was taken in 1888, I think they may have even been DC wiring.

Should be obvious because the two entities have two, conflicting goals. The telecom wants people to sign up to one of the fastest connection with no limits. They aren't going to do that by making the slower connections look like good deals in comparison to the package they wish to sell.

The municipal network wants to get as many people connected as possible so it makes sense for them to be charging less for the lower speed connections. All they care about is making enough money back to maintain and make the

Community-based Internet could have been AWESOME had the WiMax (802.16 series) technology--one that could handle thousands of wireless connections from one transceiving tower--taken off in the USA. WiMax could have made it possible for community Internet, especially in rural areas where the "last mile" connection would have been very expensive to do.